Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Panel 1: “During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12″ (45.7 x 30.5 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Acquired 1942. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

In November 1941, the indomitable art dealer Edith Halpert organized a special preview of a remarkable group of works by a young African American painter at her Downtown Gallery; the series remained on view through the following month as part of the exhibition “American Negro Art,” and the artist became part of Halpert’s prestigious stable—the first time a black artist had been represented by a New York gallery. The preternaturally gifted painter was Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), a twenty-three-year-old Harlem resident who had been mentored by the distinguished black artist Charles Alston; the paintings were Lawrence’s “The Migration of the Negro”, now known as “The Migration Series”: sixty vivid, spatially adventurous, richly colored panels painted in casein tempera on hardboard, each approximately eighteen by twelve inches (some vertical, some horizontal), with accompanying captions. Lawrence’s bold, simplified images encapsulated the causes, events, and effects of the great movement of Southern African Americans who sought work and better living conditions in the North, beginning soon after the start of World War I—a journey that Lawrence’s parents had themselves made. Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern